by André Aciman
The Great War may have stunned the world, but within a few years, the magnates, tycoons, and movie stars came back to the Lido. They disappeared again during World War II—only to return once more. They have not vanished a third time. Since the postwar reinstallation of the Venice Film Festival in 1949, the Lido has retained an aura of jet-set exclusivity that appeals to the very wealthy, the wannabes, and the not-so-wealthy beneficiaries of sub-rosa promotional rates. People come here to mingle with movie stars. Or they come here knowing that they will stay in a room that was occupied by one. Or they come to feel like one. Or they come for Thomas Mann. But everyone comes for the sea.
For this, of all the spots in Venice, is where everyone can literally dip their toes into water. The Grand Canal, like the rivers ringing Manhattan, is off-limits: murky, gray-green, lusterless. The water on the Lido, however, is always calm, alternating between slate green and light blue. You can wade into it and walk a great distance before it touches your knees; even then, the Adriatic is clement and, with hardly any undertow, easy to swim. Far out in these waters, you can allow your mind to wander until all you see is the diminutive outline of the hotel at whose beach you’re swimming. The Hôtel des Bains and the Excelsior have a partnership, and by showing a pass at either, you can swim in the pool or at the beach, or rent a beach cabana and sit in the shade. The scene hasn’t changed since Mann described it in 1911:
The shallow gray sea was already gay with children wading, with swimmers, with figures in bright colors lying on the sandbanks with arms behind their heads. Some were rowing in little keelless boats painted red and blue, and laughing when they capsized. A long row of capanni ran down the beach, with platforms, where people sat as on verandas, and there was social life, with bustle and with indolent repose; visits were paid, amid much chatter, punctilious morning toilettes hobnobbed with comfortable and privileged dishabille. On the hard wet sand close to the sea figures in white bathrobes or loose wrappings in garish colors strolled up and down.
But it is the water that I love most. The anticipation begins as soon as I land at the Excelsior’s dock, then builds as I check in and am shown to my room. The bellhop, waiting for his tip, sets down my luggage, showcases the minibar, and explains the workings of the thermostat and the television set. Then, knowing this is the most luminous moment of all—like a street performer who hits the high C while his assistant makes the rounds with an empty bowler hat—he throws open the window overlooking the beach. There is a sudden influx of muffled sounds—the surf below, children at play, arguments—and a bold, rough, telltale smell of salt that does not go well with the dormant, well-kept room, which is at once sheltered and sheltering and which bears the soothing floral scent of well-starched cotton sheets, choice detergents, and cleaning fluids. Sea fever. Five minutes later, with or without jet lag, I will find my way to the beach. I know where I’ve packed my bathing suit and my beach thongs. It’s late in the afternoon. Swims at this hour belong to those who live on the beach, not to those who must return to the city or who are desperately stuffing their days with tourist activities. These swims—when the water is warm and the beach is almost empty and the beach-keepers have started sweeping the sand—can stretch past sunset. It is in those moments that I realize the ultimate illusion, the ultimate luxury: I can imagine that this is my city, my beach, my home.
The Lido is the best way to experience Venice. Venice is a crowded city, and on hot summer days the weather is unbearable: the sirocco, the desert wind, steals the breath from your lungs. On hot days, there is nowhere to sit in Venice unless it’s in a restaurant or a café or on the edge of a scalding cistern. Nor is there respite from the crowds that, like toothpaste squeezed out of a tube, push through the narrow passageways that join one campo to another. What good is having the sea all around you if you can’t even touch it on such days? On the Lido, though, I can spend half a day at my hotel, on the beach or in the large swimming pool, and then get on the shuttle boat and in twenty minutes be standing in St. Mark’s Square. After dinner, I can hop the shuttle and be back at the Excelsior in no time.
And if I should miss the last shuttle, then, failing a water taxi, I’ll take the final vaporetto from Venice, sit back, and, as I did years ago, watch the moonlit water-city sparkle in the dark. I’ll lean on the railing of the speeding ferry boat and stare at the lagoon and watch the Lido draw nearer, until it will be time to get off at the Piazzale Santa Maria Elisabetta, as I did the first time I came here looking for the bygone luxury of a bygone world. I’ll walk down the Gran Viale toward the beach, turn right along my beloved lungomare, and, if I’m in the mood, keep walking past the Hôtel des Bains: the view of the quiet Adriatic Sea in the dark of night is nothing short of breathtaking.
But before reaching the promenade, I might decide to stay on the Viale. It is flanked by several hotels and large, vibrant alfresco trattorias, as well as many ice-cream stands where the local folk sit around tables, three generations crammed together, their chairs spilling into the street. I like to walk up and down the Gran Viale in the evening because it reminds me that, try as I wish to see the ghosts of a late-nineteenth-century world, that world is destined to evade me. It may no longer exist except in books and films and in our collective imagination—layer upon layer of images, starting in 1907, when the Excelsior was built; then skipping to 1912, when Mann’s novella was published; then to Visconti’s 1971 film; and on to Benjamin Britten’s 1973 opera of the same name. I add to these, of course, memories of my own trips here; they haunt my swims and my strolls along the lungomare. As I try to understand why it is so difficult for me to define this sense of near-total bliss that is never total enough, I recall Henry James’s prescient words. The important thing about Venice, he wrote in Italian Hours, is “to linger and remain and return.”
And so I like the simplicity of the Gran Viale, with its permanently closed Fascist-style casino, next to which the Venice Film Festival marks the end of each summer. I like how the Gran Viale contrasts with the magnificence of the two hotels. Perhaps I need this contrast. I need it to remember that what I hope to find here each time no longer exists, that this is just a hotel, that this is just a beach resort. And having made my peace with my century, I can come in from the garden, climb the wide staircase, and catch myself thinking, if only for a split second: This is not me now, this is someone else—someone who will sit on the balcony, order a drink, and for a while at least, as he looks to the horizon, think that there is not a thing more to want in life.
Place des Vosges
Even today, after many years, there are moments when your eyes could almost be fooled—when they’ll still believe that however you wandered into this huge quadrangle called the Place des Vosges, you’ll never find your way out. Wherever you turn your gaze, this mini-Paris in the heart of old Paris, and perhaps the most beautiful urban spot in the world, seems to turn its back not just on the rest of the world but on the rest of Paris as well. You step in—and time stops.
At night, when the Place des Vosges grows quiet and traffic comes to a halt, the arched entrances under the Pavillons du Roi and de la Reine blend into the darkness, as do the two narrow side streets tucked to the northeast and northwest of the Place, the rue des Francs-Bourgeois and the rue du Pas-de-la-Mule. With no apparent means out, it is impossible not to feel that you are indeed back in this self-contained, self-sufficient seventeenth-century enclave, just as the original founders of the square, four hundred years ago, wished to be locked in a Paris of their own devising—a Paris that had the very best of Paris, a Paris that hadn’t quite been invented yet and of which this was a promise. Recent restoration has been so successful that the Place looks better today than it has in three centuries and gives a very good picture of the Paris its ancien régime founders envisioned.
On the Place des Vosges, you can almost touch old Paris. At midnight, upon leaving L’Ambroisie (at no. 9)—among the best and most expensive restaurants in Paris, in the building where Louis XIII stayed during th
e 1612 inauguration of the square—you don’t just step into seventeenth-century Paris but into a Paris where the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are superimposed over earlier and later times no less beguilingly than Atget’s vieux Paris photos can still cast albuminous sepia tones over today’s Paris. The footsteps heard along the dark arcades may not even belong to a living soul but to shadows from the past—say, Victor Hugo, who lived at 6 Place des Vosges between 1832 and 1848, or Cardinal Richelieu, who two centuries earlier lived diagonally across the square (at no. 21), or the occasional ruffian who would turn up in this affluent enclave and terrorize the ladies. Turn around and you might just as easily spot the fleeting silhouette of the notorious seventeenth-century courtesan Marion Delorme (at no. 11), heading home under the cover of the arcades; or of France’s most illustrious preacher, Bossuet (at no. 17); or of Madame de Rambouillet (at no. 15), whose salon was a who’s who of seventeenth-century France. Delorme had been Cardinal Richelieu’s mistress once but was now accompanied by Cardinal de Retz, one of France’s most devoted ladies’ men. A habitué of the Place des Vosges, Retz, the turbulent antimonarchist, had been the lover of both Marie-Charlotte de Balzac d’Entragues (at no. 23) and the Princesse de Guéméné (at no. 6).
Many aristocratic ladies who lived on the square and around the Marais were known as précieuses: women who adopted an overrefined, highly conceited form of speech that, despite their cultivated delicacy in attitude and taste, by no means entailed an equally cultivated sense of morality. They frequently had several lovers, and the Princesse de Guéméné was no exception. She loved the unruly Count of Montmorency-Boutteville, who had also been the lover of Madame de Sablé (at no. 5) and who, following a terrible duel à six in 1627 in front of the home of Cardinal Richelieu (who had made dueling a capital offense in France), was subsequently captured and beheaded. Such would be the fate of two of the Princesse’s other lovers.
Nothing better illustrates these crisscrossed, overlapping, and at times simultaneous passions than the loves of another précieuse, Marguerite de Béthune (at no. 18). She was the daughter of the Duc de Sully, King Henry IV’s superintendent of finances, who was instrumental in planning the Place des Vosges (his Hôtel de Sully still feeds into the Place through a tiny, near-inconspicuous door at no. 7). Marguerite had been the mistress of both the Duc de Candale (at no. 12) and the Marquis d’Aumont (at no. 13). Since the even numbers on the Place des Vosges are located to the east of the Pavillon du Roi, and the odd to the west, it is possible to suppose that when she was with one she could easily manage to think of, if not spy on, the other.
Throughout its history, the very thought of the Place des Vosges has instantly conjured images of grand passion and grand intrigue. The importance that the Place des Vosges has in the French imagination, like that of Versailles, may explain why French literature, from the seventeenth century on, has never quite been able to disentangle love from its surrogate, double-dealing, or courtship from diplomacy, underscored as they all are by the cruelest and crudest form of self-interest. Such irony escaped no one, and certainly not the disabused courtiers of précieux society.
Few of them had anything kind to say about love or about the women they loved. Cardinal de Retz’s racy and tempestuous Mémoires were most exquisitely vicious in this regard. (Of his ex-mistress Madame de Montbazon, he wrote, “I have never known anyone who, in her vices, managed to have so little regard for virtue.”) And yet his Mémoires are dedicated to one of the précieux world’s busiest writers, his good friend Madame de Sévigné, born at 1 bis Place des Vosges. Sévigné was herself a very close friend of the Duchesse de Longueville, Madame de Sablé, the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, and Madame de La Fayette, the author of Europe’s first modern novel, La Princesse de Clèves. To show how intricately interwoven this world was, one has only to recall that La Rochefoucauld may have had a platonic relationship with La Fayette but he most certainly did not with the Duchesse de Longueville, with whom he had a son and for whom the disillusioned and embittered La Rochefoucauld probably continued to ache until the very end of his days. Known as one of the most beautiful women of the period, the fair-haired Duchesse led as blustery a life as Cardinal de Retz—first as a lover, then as a warrior, and finally as a religious woman. It was because of her bitter feud with her rival, Madame de Montbazon, that another duel took place on the square, between descendants of the Guise and the Coligny families. Each man may have gallantly taken the side of one of the two women, but after about a century of feuding between the Catholic Guises and the Protestant Colignys there was enough gall for another duel. It took Coligny almost five months to die of his wounds. It is said that the Duchesse de Longueville watched the duel from the windows of 18 Place des Vosges, the home of Marguerite de Béthune, the woman whose lovers’ pavilions faced each other. The quarrel between the Duchesse de Longueville and Madame de Montbazon reads like a novel filled with slander, malice, jealousy, and spite.
Scandalmongering was a favorite occupation, and the preferred weapon was not so much the sword as the letter: dropped, intercepted, recopied, falsely attributed, and purloined letters were ferried back and forth, leaving a trail that invariably led to the loss of reputations and, just as frequently, of life—Coligny’s in this instance—and ultimately to civil unrest. At the risk of oversimplifying, tensions mounted to such a pitch that many of those who had anything to do with the Place des Vosges before the middle of the seventeenth century eventually joined the Fronde, the antimonarchist aristocratic campaign of 1648–53. It was the last aristocratic revolt against the monarchy, and Louis XIV, the Sun King, never forgot it. To ensure that the aristocracy never again rose against him, he made certain that almost every one of its members moved to Versailles.
Like its storied residents, the Place des Vosges remains a tangle of the most capricious twists in urban memory. Known initially as the Place Royale in 1605, it became the Place des Fédérés after the Revolution in 1792; the Place de l’Indivisibilité in 1793; and then the Place des Vosges in 1800, under Napoléon. It resumed its first name in 1814, after the restoration of the monarchy, and lost it once more to the Place des Vosges in 1831. After yet another revolution, it became once again the Place Royale in 1852, and finally the Place des Vosges in 1870. The Place teemed with intellectuals, writers, aristocrats, salons, and courtesans. It witnessed generations of schemes, rivalries, and duels, the most famous of these being the duel of 1614, known as “the night of the torches,” between the Marquis de Rouillac and Philippe Hurault, each flanked by his second, everyone wielding a sword in one hand and a blazing torch in the other. Three were killed; Rouillac alone survived, and lived thereafter at 2 Place des Vosges.
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I come to the Place des Vosges to make believe that I belong, that this could easily become my home. Paris is too large a city, and time is too scarce for me to ever become a full resident—but this square is just right. After a few days, I am at home. I know every corner, every restaurant, and every grocer and bookstore beyond the square. Even faces grow familiar, as does the repertoire of the high-end street entertainers and singers who come to perform under the arcades every Saturday: the pair singing duets by Mozart, the tango and fox-trot dancers, the Baroque ensembles, the pseudo-Django jazz guitarist, and the eeriest countertenor–mock castrato bel canto singer I’ve ever heard, each standing behind stacks of their own CDs.
For lunch, I’ve grown to like La Mule du Pape on the rue du Pas-de-la-Mule, scarcely off the square: light fare, fresh salads, excellent desserts. And early in the morning, I like to come to Ma Bourgogne, on the northwest corner of the square, and have breakfast outside, under the arcades. I’ve been here three times already, and I am always among the first to sit down. I think I have my table now, and the waiter knows I like café crème and a buttered baguette with today’s jam. I even get here before the bread arrives from the baker’s. I sit at the corner of this empty square and watch schoolboys plod their way diagonally across the park, one after the other, somet
imes in pairs or clusters, each carrying a heavy satchel or a briefcase strapped around his shoulders. I can easily see my sons doing this. Yes, it does feel right. Then, just as I am getting used to the square and am busily making it my home—tarts, salads, fresh produce, baguette, jam, coffee—I look up, spot the imposing row of redbrick pavilions with their large French windows and slate roofs, and realize that this, as I always knew but had managed to forget, is the most beautiful spot in the civilized world.
Parisians, of course, have always known this, and during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries routinely overwhelmed foreign dignitaries by escorting them to the Place before returning them to the business of their visit. What must have struck these foreigners was something perhaps more dazzling and arresting than French magnificence or French architecture. For the Place des Vosges is not magnificent in the way that, say, Versailles or the Louvre or the Palais-Royal is magnificent. And the thirty-six cloned, slate-roofed, redbrick, and limestone “row house” pavilions—with the interconnecting arcades, or promenoirs, running the length of all four sidewalks of a square no larger than the size of a Manhattan city block—can by no stretch of the imagination be called a miracle of seventeenth-century architecture. As with any cour carrée, what is striking is not necessarily each unit but the repetition thirty-six times of the same unit, many of which already boast a small square courtyard within. It is the symmetry of the square that casts a spell, not each segment—except that here the symmetry is projected on so grand a scale that it ends up being as disorienting and as humbling as quadratic symmetry is in Descartes or contrapuntal harmonies in Bach. If the French have nursed an unflagging fondness for Cartesian models, it is not because they thought nature was framed in quadrants but, rather, because their desire to fathom it, to harness it, and ultimately to explain it as best they could led them to chop up everything into pairs and units of two. Drawing and quartering may have been one of the worst forms of execution, but the French mania for symmetry has also given us palaces and gardens and the most spectacular urban planning imaginable, the way it gave us something that the French have treasured since long before the Enlightenment and of which they are still unable to divest themselves even when they pretend to try: a passion for clarity.